Green energy: Ontario’s ballot box question?

It’s a clean energy future or bust for the Ontario Liberals, who burst onto the campaign scene last week with a ballot box question.

Do you want a modern, green, job-rich future?

The party hopes the Ontario electorate says “yes.” After a summer of lumping Ontario’s Green Energy Act in as with other points in his party’s platform, Dalton McGuinty is moving to make it his signature item.

It’s unclear whether this strategy was the Liberal’s plan all along, or whether it resulted from PC leader Tim Hudak’s repeated criticism of the Green Energy Act. Either way, Queen’s University professor Warren Mabee said he’s watching the issue elevate with interest.

“I think it’s definitely one of the key issues around which this election will turn,” Mabee said.

Mabee recalled that Hudak, months ago, got an early start on the issue: “He basically went as far as he could in saying the Green Energy Act was a bad idea, and he would turn the clock back.” But then McGuinty started to ramp up the rhetoric.

Case in point: the Liberal leader’s dare to Hudak at an early campaign stop in London, Ont. He challenged the absent PC leader to follow through on a platform promise to kill the controversial Samsung deal, from which London workers stand to benefit.

“Do as I’ve done, meet with those workers, shake their hands, look them in the eyes and tell them, ‘I’m killing their jobs, I’m killing your future, I’m sorry about that,’” McGuinty said.

The declaration was pure political showmanship. Hudak has been clear all along that he opposes the Samsung deal – tackling it on page six of the “Changebook.”

“We will end the king of all secret, sweetheart deals – the $7 billion Samsung deal – that happened without a competitive process or a guarantee of job creation targets,” the section reads. “Building our green energy sector cannot be achieved by writing a cheque to one single, foreign-owned multinational corporation that was handed every advantage.”

Green energy has been on the Ontario political agenda for as long as McGuinty has been on the scene, notes Cristine de Clercy, a political science professor at the University of Western Ontario.

“It was the debate about Ontario’s energy self-sufficiency that helped to bring about the election of Mr. McGuinty in the first place. And the issue surfaced again in 2003. So to me it’s not at all surprising that it’s returned as one of the main issues in 2011.”

But people don’t pay much attention to politics during the summer. Now the writ has dropped, de Clercy says Ontario voters can expect the green energy issue to stay red-hot.

“It’s kind of like the political season is back in traction. So the language is strong, the message is deliberately strong and provocative – precisely because they’re trying to get voters’ attention.”

But the future of energy is a complicated issue on which to stake your political fortunes. A key problem this campaign is the lack of substantive communication. This goes for everyone involved, Mabee said. The Liberals haven’t been very clear in explaining what the Green Energy Act does, or what it could do. The Tories haven’t been very clear about how it would change if they were in power.

The NDP have also shied away from discussing how their party would handle the Act, and concentrated on green energy as one source of jobs.

“Part of the problem on the Conservative side is that they haven’t been very clear about what exactly they would do,” Mabee said. “Whether they would cut every existing contract, whether they would phase it out, whether they would revise it, could they really tear up a contract with Samsung?”

If the Liberals want to sell voters on the Green Energy Act, their best chance to do it is right about now, said Henry Jacek, a political science professor at McMaster University. That’s because, one month before e-day, people are willing to try to understand more complex information.

“I think as you get closer to the ballot box, to people making the choice, the Conservative advantage diminishes because people are willing to understand the complexities of the Liberal positions. I’m not saying they’ll accept it necessarily. But they’re willing to entertain, and try to understand a lot more of the complexity.”

For the electorate, it’s a difficult choice in a recession-conscious era.

“You’ve got two different views or opinions,” Jacek said. “Are you concerned about the cost of all this? Over the transitional term, it’s going to cost more money. Or do you say we have to create these new kinds of jobs, because we’re losing the old jobs and they’re not coming back?”

Jacek added that the Liberal’s vocal support for green energy is bad news for the Green Party, which is seeing its support slip as strategic voters throw their support behind McGuinty to keep the Act intact.